Digital Marketing

Social Media Marketing – I Tweet every once in a while – does that count?

Wrong – tweeting every once in a while is good, however it under utilizes the full potential social media marketing offers businesses. Simply creating social media content is only the beginning of social media marketing for businesses.

“Internet users spend 4x more time on Facebook than on Google.”

How crazy is it to think people spend more time on Facebook scrolling through updates of their friends, rather than actively searching on Google. At first, this statistic surprised me but when I stopped to assess my internet usage I can admit I fall into the same trap. I think that I don’t spend that much time on Facebook however in the hour spent watching the HubSpot video I’ll admit I checked Facebook 3 times (to my defense 2 of those times were due to notifications). None the less, Facebook is an incredibly important social media platform for businesses to have a presence on. The key takeaway, a potential customer, depending on your target audience and demographic, would be more likely to see your advertisement or content marketing if you decided to advertise it on Facebook compared to Google. Especially, if you have the content pop up in their News Feed.

So how many users are on Facebook?

Here are some crazy statistics from the HubSpot video on active users on multiple social media platforms are:

Facebook – 1.3 billion users

Twitter – 645 million users

LinkedIn – 300 million users

Google+ – 300 million users

These statistics illustrate the increasing importance of having a strong social media marketing presence because there are so many customers and potential customers on these platforms. To not have a presence as a business would be a waste of a valuable marketing resource.

The article Listeners Never Lose, mentioned how “Right now, anyone with the right technology can scan a huge portion of the Internet and – within minutes – see how people across the web feel about a topic. ‘Social listening’ (or sometimes ‘social monitoring’) refers to any software that searches social networks and websites for mentions of a keyword.”. When I pondered this idea, I realized there is so much data at our fingertips right now and the ability to ‘socially listen’ to keywords and trends at a certain point in time and then alter your data to fit this is transforming how businesses use social media marketing. Also, social media – specifically social care – is the best way to address customer issues and complaints. You can address the mistakes your company has made and rectify the situation through communication with your customers vocally and visibly.

You need to start by asking the right questions to develop your content. Furthermore, knowing your buyer persona when developing your social media marketing is crucial as well. If content is king then distribution is queen and having a presence on the right social channels is essential. You also want to optimize your profiles in a similar process to how you optimized your business website however it will be done on a smaller scale for your social media profiles. Also, include keywords in your profile or posts to make your business more searchable and will improve the SEO of your website.

As a company, you also want to establish how you’ll address angry customers – Are you avoiding them or facing their complaints head on?

If a complaint does occur and it’s publicized on a social media platform try not to escalate the situation and instead to reply to the customer through direct messages (DM) to fix the problem. You want to take the conversation offline so you don’t have numerous spectators, however you still want to make sure you address their issues and complaints quickly and effectively. This is a key aspect of having social media profiles because many of your customers who have issues or complaints will turn to these platforms to voice their issues because of the sheer visibility it gives them.

Here’s an example of a customer complaint on twitter:

Domino’s Pizza did a wonderful job of not only address the issue the customer Stephanie had but also moved to take the conversation offline by requesting her to DM them with specific information so they could remedy the situation and prevent it from blowing up.

Also, monitor who has access to write tweets for your business. Many agencies that tweet for companies have a representative who will write tweets for your business, however they also have personal twitter’s and could accidentally tweet something to your business’s twitter instead of their personal twitter account that could hurt your business or brand image. Make sure there are checks and balances to prevent this from occurring and monitor how frequently you use automatic tweets as well. As a business, you want to monitor and ensure the tweets your sending out don’t send the wrong message at an inappropriate time. During the Boston bombing, a certain Boston business had set up automatic tweets and didn’t check current events on that day and was sending out encouragement for the race. They quickly had to resolve the situation and turn off their automatic tweets.

Ultimately, social media is an essential tool that all businesses should be utilizing in the ever changing digital world. However, there are added mishaps and issues businesses will encounter by utilizing social media platforms and they need to be prepared to deal with these issues in a timely and efficient manner.